Jodi Newcombe

Jodi Newcombe founded Carbon Arts following a 15 year international career as an environmental economist and sustainability consultant. Her work on natural resource management and policy design, green technology and low-carbon design inform her work with the creative sector.

Carbon Arts works with scientists, businesses, industry, forward-thinking governments and artists to communicate sustainability in innovative and compelling ways, and in providing tangible, interactive means in which people can engage in the sustainability narrative. Trained as an engineer (BChE, University of Sydney) and environmental economist (MSc, University College London), Jodi sees such trans-disciplinary modes of thinking and collaborating as the way out of the current ecological crisis.

Jodi is currently developing a number of significant public artworks in partnership with leading artists and arts organisations, developers and government that seek to influence the public’s stewardship of the environment. Use of real-time data, sensing technology and social media are key features of this work.

Carbon Arts has also explored the narrative of culture and climate change as it relates to our food habits and culinary identity. Working with award winning environmental artists and chefs, Jodi has delivered a suite of conceptual and collaborative dining adventures that invite the public to participate in the creation of more sustainable and delicious food systems.

Carbon Arts puts art and design at the centre of sustainability challenges www.carbonarts.org

Highlight Productions

This is the race of the century: a race to upgrade our infrastructure to be leaner and greener. Each day of Building Run 2013 saw new obstacles, new winners and an infinite stream of insightful and poetic moments that speak to this very human challenge. Witness the fitness.

Keith Deverell is an Australian video artist whose installations use site specificity to poetically comment on the current socioeconomic climate.

ECHOLOGY: Making Sense of Data competition, an initiative of Carbon Arts and AustralianNetwork for Art and Technology (ANAT) with Lend Lease

“Mussel Choir” by artist Natalie Jeremijenko for Docklands, Melbourne

Jeremijenko’s Mussel Choir, a biological artwork using the movements of a mussel colony to communicate water quality improvements in the Docklands’ aquatic ecosystem.

One mussel can filter as much as 6-9 litres of water/hour. By instrumenting mussels with hall effect sensors, which indicate the opening and closing of their shells, and by giving them each a voice, converting the data into sound, the artwork uses the behavior of the organisms themselves as a biologically meaningful measure of pollutant exposure in order to produce a public spectacle.

Storm water run-off, local weather, and seasons will have evident effects on the “Choir’s performances. The “songs” will map parameters such as water depth to sound pitch, presence of pollutants to sound timbre, and the rate of the opening and closing of mussel shells to sound tempo, for example.The mussels will become rock stars.

Sensing Sydney: Communicating sustainability through art, open data and public space, with City of Sydney

Sensing Sydney was a collaboration that invited artists to bring sustainability data alive in ways that celebrate and advance our collective efforts to address environmental challenges from energy efficiency to greener transport.

The project featured a public art commission, Building Run 2013, an exciting data-driven video installation in September 2013 as part of Art & About – Sydney’s foremost collaborative arts festival, which sees both the artist and the general public use the city as a canvas for creation and storytelling.

The project also featured a City Data Slam as part of ISEA2013, which brought together leading national and international data art practitioners over the last weekend of ISEA2013 to jam with Sydney’s sustainability data at Object Gallery in Surry Hills, Sydney.